Mobile

The pixel-peepers over at DxOMark have shared some of the interesting metrics and techniques they use to judge the quality of a smartphone’s artificial bokeh, or background blur in photos. Not only is it difficult to do in the first place, but they have to systematize it! Their guide should provide even seasoned shooters with

The FCC may be hard at work at “bridging the digital divide,” as Chairman Pai so frequently puts it, and the Connect America Fund II will help. But while the big players are setting up, people all over the U.S. are going without reliable internet. Mozilla and the National Science Foundation are awarding cash to

What if you could digitally sculpt a 3D object and share it on Facebook, play with it in virtual reality, or insert it into your world with augmented reality? Facebook is polishing up stages one and two today after first debuting posts of interactive 3D models in News Feed in October that you can move

As we reported last month, Google is uniting all of its different payment tools under the Google Pay brand. On Android, however, the Android Pay app stuck with its existing brand. That’s changing today, though, with the launch of Google Pay for Android. With this, Google is rolling out an update to Android Pay and introducing some

A half-dozen years after launching Wikipedia Zero, The Wikimedia Foundation is sunsetting the program. Announced in 2012, it was the result of partnerships with mobile carriers, designed to waive the cost of accessing the free encyclopedia in developing countries, where data fees presented a barrier to accessing the site’s seemingly bottomless well of information. The

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its

Despite a lot of backlash over a big redesign for the Snapchat app — which to be sure is a very big deal for a product-centric company like Snap — Snap CEO Evan Spiegel vigorously defended the redesign and basically said people need to get used to it. Spiegel said at the Goldman Sachs Internet

Project Fi, Google’s multi-network cell service, now provides you with data coverage in 170 countries. That’s up from the 135 countries the company has long offered service in. New countries where service is now available include the likes of Belize and Myanmar. The good thing here is that Project Fi still doesn’t charge you extra

TechCrunch has learned of a potentially serious new bug affecting a wide range of Apple devices. During their development work on an international news feed, software engineers at Aloha Browser discovered two Unicode symbols in a non-English language that can crash any Apple device that uses Apple’s default San Francisco font. The bug instigates crashes

MIT researchers have developed a chip designed to speed up the hard work of running neural networks, while also reducing the power consumed when doing so dramatically – by up to 95 percent, in fact. The basic concept involves simplifying the chip design so that shuttling of data between different processors on the same chip is

Things are still looking pretty bleak for Huawei’s plans to conquer the U.S. market. Earlier this week, half a dozen top members of intelligence agencies, including the FBI, CIA and NSA reaffirmed surveillance concerns about the company and fellow Chinese smartphone maker ZTE. All of this is nothing new, of course. The companies’ troubles date

Good morning and happy Wednesday, everyone! Here is a thing that falls under Today In Very Good Things: Pinterest is going to, finally, finally, let you move pins around on your boards. This seems really small and trivial but, really, this is one of the biggest quality of life improvements to the service that I’ve seen

ESPN may be going from a sure-fire cable bounty to something that needs a little more flexibility in a cord-cutting era — like launching a new streaming service in 2018. But an even more troublesome trend may be emerging among younger sports fans, according to Overtime CEO Dan Porter: they just aren’t getting the content the way

Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will go live tomorrow. It’s the first time Google will automatically block some ads in Chrome, but while quite a few online publishers are fretting about this move, as a regular user, you may not even notice it. The most important thing to know is that this is not an alternative

French startup Adikteev raised a $12 million funding round led by Ring Capital and BNP Paribas Développement, with existing investors ISAI, Ventech and Laurent Asscher also participating. It’s also worth noting that it represents Ring Capital’s first investment after raising its initial $170 million fund. Adikteev is an adtech startup that previously acquired Motion Lead,

HTC’s smartphone and connected devices president and former CFO, Chialin Chang, has resigned. The move, spotted earlier by Engadget, was announced today and is effective immediately. Chang joined the company as CFO in 2012, moving there from Goldman Sachs. He also previously ran HTC’s global sales business — before eventually becoming president of smartphones and

Snapchat has a new ally or enemy depending on how you look at Google’s new mobile magazine format, but the social app is welcoming the search giant. Google’s clone of Snapchat Discover, called AMP Stories, officially launched today, allowing news outlets to create photo/video slideshows that appear in mobile search results and on their site.

All over the world, language barriers are limiting the ability of refugees and immigrants to seek help, and aid workers to provide it. Tarjimly is a new service that connects people who speak one language but need to speak in another, with a person who speaks both — in just a couple minutes. They’re part

ARM doesn’t build any chips itself, but its designs are at the core of virtually every CPU in modern smartphones, cameras and IoT devices. So far, the company’s partners have shipped more than 125 billion ARM-based chips. After moving into GPUs in recent years, the company today announced that it will now offer its partners

For the most part, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project was about what its name implies: accelerating mobile pages. Unsurprisingly, that mostly meant quickly loading and rendering existing articles on news sites, recipes and other relatively text-heavy content. With that part of AMP being quite successful (if not always beloved) now, Google is looking to take

Essential knew it had a hard road ahead of it. Andy Rubin and company acknowledged as much when they launched a handset aimed at taking on the likes of Apple and Samsung. Given that the company hasn’t issued anything in the way of official numbers thus far, a new batch of numbers from IDC are

Despite plenty of uncertainty swirling around Instacart and its complex relationship with Whole Foods — now owned by Amazon — investors still seem to not be too worried, and are pouring a fresh big round of financing into the startup that values it at $4.2 billion. Instacart said it raised $200 million in a new

It’s that time of year again. Samsung is getting ready to unpack some shiny new high end smartphones at the world’s biggest mobile confab. And Android fans are getting ready to cheer. The TechCrunch team will be on the ground at MWC in Barcelona in two weeks’ time to bring you all the news. But

Schools are often late to taking advantage of new technologies, so today still do much of their business over paper forms. One pain point in particular – for school administrators, teachers and parents alike – is handling permission forms for activities and field trips. A young startup called Script aims to help. Schools can use

How can Facebook promote meaningful interaction between users? Apparently by letting them downvote inappropriate, offensive, or misleading comments to hide them. Facebook is now testing a downvote button on a limited set of public Page post comment reels, the company confirms to TechCrunch. A Facebook spokesperson tells us “We are not testing a dislike button.

Earlier this week, iOS source code showed up on GitHub, raising concerns that hackers could find a way to comb the material for vulnerabilities. Apple has confirmed with TechCrunch that the code appears to be real, but adds that it’s tied to old software. The material is gone now, courtesy of a DMCA notice Apple

WhatsApp has begun testing a new payments feature in India that will allow people to send money to other WhatsApp users, excluding merchant accounts. The feature is currently in beta, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans, but hasn’t been publicly announced because it’s not widely available at this time. The company has been working

Here at TechCrunch, we cover company earnings on a pretty regular basis. And we promise it’s for a good reason: The success and failure of these publicly-traded companies tends to give us at least one more data point when it comes to calibrating which technologies are exciting to investors, as well as the trajectory of those

Turing Robotic’s CEO says the company isn’t done. But it’s definitely hit another significant roadblock in its quest to bring some fun alternative handsets to the market. The Finnish phone maker’s story so far is one of delay after delay, and now it’s announced, via Facebook post, that it’s suspending manufacturing. CEO Syl Chao didn’t

Studio, a startup that delivers coaching, music and competition to treadmill runners’ smartphones and smartwatches, is getting a boost from treadmill maker Life Fitness. Studio founder and CEO Jason Baptiste explained that through this partnership, Studio’s classes will be available on Life Fitness treadmills in gyms, starting with the ones equipped with the company’s Discover